Musings of a retired barrel racer who's now a romance writer penning stories set in the rodeo world.
Strong, hot cowboys and the cowgirls who tame them.

Sunday

Cowboy and the Trophy Gopher

Being a good farmer takes a certain type of personality.

I
don’t have it.

My cowboy and I have raised cattle and hay for the last
thirty years usually with seventy or more acres of hay. I tend to be rather
laid back when it comes to farming. The water will eventually get to the bottom
of the field. Most of the hay will grow. What’s so hard about this?

On the other hand, the cowboy has an elaborate set of farming
rules. We argued about, uh, discussed our differing opinions for several
years until I found a job in town, and he farmed to his heart’s content.

One of the scourges of growing that much alfalfa is a small
rodent called a gopher. It moves into a perfectly nice field, has tons of
babies and each digs holes at an unbelievable rate. As the irrigation water
runs down the field and into a hole, it disappears. The area below the hole
dries out, and the hay dies.

The cowboy has waged all-out war on these burrowing invaders
for years, checking his traps daily, spring, summer and fall. During this time,
he’s tried repeatedly to convince me that since my hands are smaller, it would
be easier for me to set the traps in the narrow little holes.

I’m proud to say I didn’t fall for this con.

The county pays two dollars a tail and with three hundred
gophers a year, this is a nice little side line. He’s saved the tails and cashed
them in and the bodies were…well, let’s just say our dog Cindy was a gopher
gourmet.

Three years ago, he checked his trap line and found a trap
was stuck. When the cowboy finally worked it free, there he was,
Humongo-Gopher. It was the biggest gopher he’d ever trapped, maybe the biggest
gopher in the world.

He told his friends about Humongo, and they scoffed. He was
forced to take the body in for a farmer viewing and was proved right. All
agreed it was the biggest rodent they’d seen.

It was a fact. We had a trophy gopher.

Now how many people can say that?

Since it was a trophy, we couldn’t feed it to the dog, so it
went into the freezer to be preserved for posterity.

The problem is I don’t have much of a memory. If it isn’t in
front of my face, I tend to forget it exists. Because of that, I’ve spent the
last three years calmly going to my big freezer to get meat for dinner only to
be confronted each time I opened the door by long yellow teeth and curved claws.
Humongo looked like he could leap off the shelf and attack. The only thing that
kept me from jumping out of my skin was the fact he was enclosed in a Zip Lock
bag. Still, it was a shock.

Humongo finally went to the big gopher heaven in the sky
this fall, and I no longer have to fear my freezer.

The cowboy suggested we have a taxidermist mount Humongo and
put him in the trophy room (TV room) with the Elk and Deer antlers. That’s
where I put my foot down. I guess in the cowboy’s mind a trophy is a trophy but
really, Humongo was just a super-sized rat. If he’d had his way, I would be
jumping every time I wanted to watch TV.

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Sugarwater Ranch

Sean O’Connell’s life is perfect, or it was until his partying lifestyle affected his bull riding. Now he’s ended the season too broke to leave the Northwest for the warm southern rodeos. When a wild night with his buddies gets out of hand, he wakes up naked, staring into the angry eyes of a strange woman. His infallible O’Connell charm gets him nowhere with the dark-haired beauty. It’s obvious she’s not his usual good-time girl, so why can’t he forget her? Bar-manager Catherine Silvera finds a waterlogged, unconscious cowboy freezing to death in front of the Sugarwater Bar. She saves his life--then runs faster than a jackrabbit with a coyote on its tail. Any man who makes his living rodeoing is bad news, especially if Sean thinks partying is part of the competition. He’s everything she doesn’t want in a man, so why can’t Catherine shake her attraction to the rugged cowboy?

About Me

I write Ranch and Rodeo Contemporary Romance set in areas of the Northwest discovered during the years my cowboy and I competed on the rodeo circuit. I'm a city girl who fell in love with the wide open spaces. Country life and rodeos, it doesn't get any better than that.